Ok, not movies, not TV programs, but what about ... MUSIC VIDEOS - the very basis and foundation of QuickTime's rise to fame over the years!

My total as of this post: 5085
Total storage: 234 GB

...and with TB drives now on the market, I can quadruple my collection on one drive... but alas, other than the new videos that come out (if they're any good), I've reached a point where the law of diminishing returns applies - there's little left to encode that I want and don't have at this point.

BTW: Some time in the future I will post my list to the forum for fun. I'm still in the process of properly naming these videos with the "correct" song titles, grouping them, etc.

Thanks for the praise guys. My buzz-word for them is "mVidZ" on my external drive.

eddyg wrote:That's a hell of a lot of work there!

You are actually sadly correct. When ripping from my music video DvDs, it was relatively easy.

But from TV stations on my dish -> DVR -> DvD-RW -> PC-> Editor-> MPEG-2-> VIDEO_TS folder ->HandBrake ->H.264 it's quite a ride. Even more so when transferring content from some old VHS tapes.

Sure much of that work is while the machines are fed or working unattended, but what makes my work 5x more is those darn music stations. I spend alot of time adding transitions, fades, overlays, effects, etc because they tend to start a video when one is finishing or add advertising to it, etc. And I also have to filter out some of the "TV grain" or "VHS snow" even from what the music station itself has! You'd be surprised that even the stations themselves have some cruddy tape for some older videos...

...but honestly? I really do enjoy this hobby very much otherwise I would never have this many.

MichaelLAX wrote:For VHS, consider one of the combo VHS/DVD Recorders. I use a Panasonic and get excellent quality H.264 using essentially your formula with the initial VHS->DVD-RW step.

Hey Michael.

That's almost exactly what I do too. I can connect the VCR into my DVR and it's virtually similar to a VHS/DvD recorder combo. And yes, I too migrate content from DVR to my computer via RW media.

However, I do edit all captured VHS video with my computer's editor. I can't stand that "white fuzz" at the bottom of the screen and the "tape snow". Stand-alone machines don't have overlays, masks or filters for this unfortunately.

You seriously gotta love what you're doing with a project like this because it's quite a challenge...

Last edited by PuzZLeR on Sun Oct 14, 2007 8:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

PuzZLeR wrote:However, I do edit all captured VHS video with my computer's editor. I can't stand that "white fuzz" at the bottom of the screen and the "tape snow". Stand-alone machines don't have overlays, masks or filters for this unfortunately.

You seriously gotta love what you're doing with a project like this because it's quite a challenge...

I trim out the fuzz in the transcoding to H.264 stage. You are much more into this than I am, but there are some things in my VHS library worth saving. Some of it is up on YouTube under my name...

ADS Tech will be coming out with a real-time H.264 digitizing box in the future. I will be watching to see how efficient that box is...

In the meantime I keep thinking about doing the DirecTiVo HD HR10-250 hack to extract MPEG-2 HD streams, but now that DirecTV is telecasting all of their new HD channels on their MPEG-4 platform, I keep hoping for a hack of their HD HR20-700 DVR.

For non-OTA content that I must keep, and want to edit, I use my ADS Instant DVD (for Mac) digitizer to get me anamorphic 720x480 MPEG-2 content from the analog S-Video/Audio ports, edit using Pixella's PixeDV (for Mac) and resize to 853x480 (nee 848x480) in the transcoding to H.264 step.

I have been watching the following thread with great interest to see how Handbrake works in transcoding MPEG-2 streams, since I currently use VisualHub to do it now:

On my local computer I have: 700GB filled, that's about 500 movies and 40,000 songs.

On my computer stored at a friends house that has the whole collection: approximately 1500 movies, about 500 tv show episodes, and all the same songs (40,000). All told I think it takes up around 2.5 TB. About 200 kinda suck because I was using TMPGEnc 3.0 and the old divx on a single core pentium 4 @ 2.0GHz. It use to take much longer than it does now even with the x264 amazingness. This is all internal on a raid 5 array for safety, but I lose a 500 GB hard drive in the array so overall it's a 3 TB array. I should have been using Puzzler's settings the whole time for better compression and smaller space requirements.

Puzzler that is a LOT of videos to keep track of and encodes to queue... geez. I thought I had to keep track of a lot of videos.

For VHS, consider one of the combo VHS/DVD Recorders. I use a Panasonic and get excellent quality H.264 using essentially your formula with the initial VHS->DVD-RW step.

I put a tv tuner PCI card in my computer and plugged the vcr into it and just set it to video capture. Then encode the file with handbrake. It works great.

I found a good way to get stuff off a tv channel, if you have satellite or digital cable:
get irecord (http://www.ammesset.com/irecord/)
get a satellite/cable box with a firewire port (ask your service provider, I think the DMCA requires them to give you one for free if you ask)
connect it to your computer with firewire
use irecord

you get video in some weird uncompressed format which you can play with VLC, and I'm sure there's a way to convert it… overall, should be easier than some of the crazy systems some people have posted here.